Keynote speakers

Robert Hewison (cultural historian and author of Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain)

Programme will also include local entrepreneurs and key policy maker respondents – full details to follow.

Day One: Thurs 15th Sept

Doors open 9.30pm

Morning session 10am – 1pm

Introduction to CCT: Tony Sampson

Creative Industries and Entrepreneurialism: Exploring the drive by local authorities and other agencies to encourage growth in ‘creative sectors’. What impact is this really having on regional economies, and is it any more than simply ‘branding’?

Chair: Andrew Branch

Afternoon session 2-5pm

Food Cultures: Who is really setting the agenda in terms of policies on health and wellbeing in respect of what food we buy and consume? What can be done at a local level to improve ‘food cultures’ in the context of national policies which endorse a free market vision of society?

Chair: Giles Tofield

Evening drinks at the Railway Hotel

Day Two: Fri 16th Sept

Doors open 9.30am

Morning session 10-1pm

Cultural Policy, Heritage and Place-Making: What do we mean by ‘place-making’ at a local level? Who creates the stories and narratives that define how our towns and cities are to be ‘branded’? Does local cultural policy (where it still exists) have a role to play in creating really distinctive identities and differences in a globalised world economy? How is local ‘heritage’ being used to promote new narratives of towns, cities and regions?

Club Critical Theory (CCT) is a partnership between the University of East London (UEL) and Southend based social enterprise, The Cultural Engine. Established in 2014, CCT is a public engagement programme that seeks to encourage academics to get out into community spaces to explore how radical theory can inform the imaginative life of society.

For those who attended our inaugural Club Critical Theory night on 17 April, thanks again for making it such an engaging experience. Below are links to the text-based versions of both talks, on Deleuze and Bourdieu. We’re looking forward to seeing you again at our next event on the Kursaal as a Heterotopic Space on Friday, 20 June; all welcome.

UPDATE UPDATE – We are probably moving this second event into June. More to follow…

Just as we approach our first CCT event on the 17th April, plans for the second event are already afoot. We have pencilled in 25th May as a date to talk to the artist and curator Jane Millar about her proposal to curate new artworks that respond to the history and presence of the Kursaal Amusement Park.

Another aim of this project is to exhibit under-represented British cultural movements in contemporary festival installation work, robotics, automata and sideshows. Sounds fascinating.

At this moment we are talking with various theorists about using Foucault’s heterotopia as a way to critically intervene into Jane’s work on the Kursaal. Something along the lines of the amusement park as part of a juxtaposition of alternative spaces along the Essex coastline.